As much as I'm impressed with Sandy Bridge, I have a hard time explaining to myself why I should pay extra to Intel NOT to disable features like HyperThreading, AES-NI, Turbo multipliers, or whatever else these things have. The P67/H67 issue notwithstanding. Hyperthreading alone accounts for 100EURs price difference, are you kidding me? It cost them more to turn that feature off than to include it in the first place.

It seems Atom CPUs have had the capability to do VT-x from the very start. And the ability to use more than 2GBs of RAM. And if Intel had its way, all Atoms wouldn't have had PCI Express support. A shameless money grab, if you ask me. But other people, like AMD, realized that Intel's artificial segmentation left a whole market down to them (and ARM).

Count me as an educated consumer - everybody else may have forgotten the way Intel shafted the X-25 early adopters with the TRIM fiasco, or back when they made VT-x a "high end feature" with Core 2 until Microsoft stepped in, but I haven't. It's good to see Intel get its own medicine shoved down its throat.

I don't care if you like their market segmentation strategies, nor does Intel. Their primary market is OEMs building commodity computers and who want low CPU prices. The average Dell/HP/YumCha box buyer wouldn't know or care about HT, Vanderpool, AES-NI, Turbo, or any of that. Those of us in the enthusiast market who do know these things get to pay the price premium for the goodies or can buy cheap and not get the features.

If you want Intel to change, then stop buying the up-priced chips with the goodies until Intel changes its segmentation practices. As long as people are willing to pay the increased price for the features Intel has no motivation to change its binning/pricing policies.

Intel's responsibility is to their shareholders first, customers second. They play these kinds of segmentation games because they can, and because it makes more money for their shareholders. It is really no different than Microsoft charging more money for a retail version of Windows than for OEM, even though it is exactly the same code just with different licensing terms; or yet again more for a "server" flavor which -- at its core -- is still essentially the same OS, just with additional features enabled.

I decided a long time ago (late 1990s) to stick with AMD CPUs as much as possible; the only Intel-based computer I've purchased for home use in that timeframe was an Atom-based netbook. In the past couple of years I've drastically reduced my reliance on Windows as well (happily running Ubuntu Linux as my primary OS both at home and work). So yes, I am voting with my wallet.

I do buy some Intel systems at work because we're (mostly) an HP shop IT-wise, and as often as not an AMD-based HP system with the right mix of features is not available. Sure, I could spend time tracking down AMD-based systems from other vendors (or building them from parts), but that's not what I'm being paid to do; I'm a software developer first, part-time IT guy a distant second. You've gotta pick your battles...

The years just pass like trains. I wave, but they don't slow down.-- Steven Wilson

But neither can I expect Intel to be forced to change its segmentation/binning practices and set the price of all the chips in a given binning family to the price the cheapest/most disabled chip (which probably costs a few cents more per chip to produce just to blow the links to the "good stuff"), which seems to be the thrust of the OP's complaint.

Crayon Shin Chan wrote:They also should be anxious not to lose an entire market to AMD or ARM.

You think they don't realize this? When they started to lose some of the server market to AMD during the P4 era, they responded with the Core 2 architecture. They have also countered ARM to some extent with Atom.

They may be the 500 lb gorilla, but that doesn't mean they're stupid.

The years just pass like trains. I wave, but they don't slow down.-- Steven Wilson

It's always funny to see people get upset about this stuff since it's been going on for decades. The reason that people can overclock their processors is because the processor you buy is downclocked to segment the market. The 3.4 GHz chip and the 2.4 GHz chip are both made on the same day. Sure, some chips run better than others and are separated to be the top of the line, but has anyone on TechReport had a C2D that wouldn't hit 3 GHz?

It's annoying that Intel is choosing to disable hardware level features to segment the marketplace, but it shouldn't really be a shock to anyone. Until they have credible competition in the desktop space, they're going to do as they please.

TurtlePerson2 wrote:It's annoying that Intel is choosing to disable hardware level features to segment the marketplace, but it shouldn't really be a shock to anyone. Until they have credible competition in the desktop space, they're going to do as they please.

Well... they *do* have credible competition, as long as you're not building a bleeding edge system. AMD is price/performance competitive (and has been for years) for mid-range and budget systems.

potatochobit wrote:I think there was a recent game by EA maybe, they said there would be no DLC.then the game was released and people found there was already DLC waiting on the release disc...

I find this new trend far more repulsive. I don't mind paying for something if it's not something I already paid for.

How do you figure you already paid for it? You paid for a piece of plastic, not for *all* the data encoded on it.

Edit: That particular business model isn't even new. Think cable TV -- all of the channels are there on the wire coming into your house, even if all you've paid for is basic cable. But you can't (legally) decrypt the premium channels unless you pay extra for them. Even before the technology to encrypt/scramble cable channels existed (we're tallking *decades* ago now), the cable installer would put analog filters on your line to knock out the channels you hadn't paid for. Yup, yet another example of a company doing *extra* work to provide a *lower* level of service, in order to segment their product line.

The years just pass like trains. I wave, but they don't slow down.-- Steven Wilson

TurtlePerson2 wrote:It's annoying that Intel is choosing to disable hardware level features to segment the marketplace, but it shouldn't really be a shock to anyone. Until they have credible competition in the desktop space, they're going to do as they please.

Well... they *do* have credible competition, as long as you're not building a bleeding edge system. AMD is price/performance competitive (and has been for years) for mid-range and budget systems.

I think what TurtlePerson2 probably meant was that as long as they can segment and be competitive, they have no motivation not to do it. If AMD comes out with something that crushes all the non-HT-enabled, non-AES-NI-enhanced chips, Intel will have to do something to make their lower-end products more competitive. At the moment, they apparently think the segmentation gives them something to sell at each price-point consumers are looking for.